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Ask Dave Taylor: Does Facebook know too much?

By Dave Taylor, For the Camera

Posted:
02/16/2014 04:36:11 PM MST

Updated:
02/16/2014 04:36:36 PM MST

Dave Taylor For the Camera

Q: I've been thinking about how much data Facebook is collecting on the millions of people who use the service every day, from locations to tagged photos and status updates to individual postings. What kind of thing can Facebook now ascertain about us users?

A: Ah, I guess I shouldn't start by saying "friend me on Facebook," should I? :-)

Correlation of behavior patterns is something that's been a cornerstone of retail store design for many years, so it's no surprise that the data-rich world of online lends itself to similar analysis.

You're buying spaghetti sauce? You probably want pasta, too, so let's put them next to each other on the shelf (though why bread isn't available adjacent to peanut butter and jelly is still a mystery).

Digitally, the most well known case of this was when the Target online team figured out that a teen girl was pregnant based purely on a correlation between her shopping patterns and those of women who turned out to be pregnant. Back in February 2012, it was big news.

Even before that, however, Christian Rudder, the founder of popular dating site OkCupid, started correlating characteristics like whether someone liked oatmeal or the taste of beer with specific dating-related behaviors like duration of typical relationships and percentage of people seeking a casual hookup. Fascinating stuff, actually.

And then there's Facebook.

Facebook has a page called "Facebook Data Science" that analyzes trends on the site. Analyzing things such as how often people like each other's status updates, how often they tag each other in posts and changes in the relationship status (you know, the field that really only needs one option: "It's complicated") gives Facebook the ability to predict if you're about to fall in love or about to break up.

For example, Facebook has ascertained that the longer you've been in a relationship, the less likely you are to break up, and that most relationships fall apart around Christmastime.

The statisticians at Facebook also looked at single/married by geography, identifying Detroit, Los Angeles and New York as having the highest percentage of single people, while the list of cities with the highest probability of relationship formation has Colorado Springs in the lead, with El Paso, Texas, and Louisville, Ky., as the next two. In fact, three of the top five cities for forming a relationship are in Texas. Who knew?

And the other important data: single males vs. single females.

If you're a guy, Memphis, Tenn., Jacksonville, Fla., and Fort Worth, Texas, have the highest ratio of single females to males, while San Francisco, San Jose, Calif., and Seattle have the highest percentage of single men vs. women.

All of this data is anonymous, of course, but it leads to some interesting questions about invasiveness.

Will there be a day in the future when you change your relationship status to "In a relationship with X" and the system says, "Not for long, sorry."

And how would you feel about that?

Dave Taylor has been involved with the online world for long enough to be a statistical outlier and covers the tech industry at AskDaveTaylor.com. You can also find him at twitter.com/davetaylor.

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